The Missing Link in Jazz History - Music Rising

The
Missing Link in
Jazz
~ by Jason Berry ~
54 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES \ Fall1998
History
"
0 one know, p,ed,ely when the di,tinctive wund
of jazz music found its form. By 1905, Buddy Bolden's pioneering horn play had made him a highly popular figure in
black New Orleans. How much of a definable idiom had
A 1rihvrc (a 1hr (rQdlt> of JAIZ
come together before then is a mystery. Bolden's band
reportedly made a recording; however it was never found.
m"'ft of mem";"
Bolden himself was never interviewed. In 1907, after a nervous breakdown, he was institutionalized and spent the last
quarter-century of his life at a state sanitarium near St.
Francisville.
The word "jazz" did not gain popular currency until
about 1914 (three years before the first jazz recordings were
made). For at least a decade before World War I musicians
called it "ragtime" or simply, "the music."
A 1993 series by Scott Aiges and John McCusker in the
Times-Picayune sounded several authorities on the question
of origins. Richard B. Allen, former curator of The William
Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive of Tulane University, estimated
that jazz began about 1900. Bruce Raeburn, who succeeded
Allen as curator, made a more general estimate - " the
decade of 1895-1905." Lawrence Gushee, a University of
Illinois music professor who has done important historical
essays, told the newspaper: "My own view is that by 191213 there were New Orleans bands that were playing things
that were pretty much like what was recorded 10 years
later.. .! don't think we could go much further beyond that."
Jack Stewart, a researcher and member of the New
Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra, took a later view, of
1917 as when "the last pieces of the jazz puzzle were put
together."
There is indeed a puzzle to early jazz and it encompasses
ra:3Q1
more than differences on a point of origin. Perhaps there is
pm !
no consensus on "when" because we lack a probing explanaTOWN HAll
tion of "how." How exactly did the music emerge? What
were the streams of society and culture in a remote Southern
port that explain the flowering of a
new American art form, sometime
large personal archive, which is now
~ In the body of historical a part of The Historic New Orleans
between 1895 and 19177
A large, untapped terrain of
Collection.
writings about early jazz,
research surrounds the AfricanAlthough some of Russell's research
American churches in New Orleans
in Jazzmen has been revised or corchurches have been an but rected (notably in Donald M.
and its environs during those years
when the idiom grew. In the body of
Marquis's 1978 biography, In Search of
ignored. Yet the musical
historical writings about early jazz,
Buddy Bolden), the thematic lines that
churches have been all but ignored.
Russell sketched have worn well
dynamics within black
Yet the musical dynamics within
since the book's 1939 publication.
black churches carry a powerful story
Russell stressed the importance of
churches carry a powerful
about cultural memory as the music
early nineteenth-century slave dances
took shape. In a very real sense,
story about cultural memory at Congo Square as a cornerstone of
churches constitute the missing link
New Orleans culture; he also saw the
of jazz history.
as the music took shape. ~ city as a unique environment - a
multiculture before the term was
Theory and the absence of churches
coined, steeped in musical tides that sent jazz spreading
In the six decades since Frederic Ramsey, Jr. collaborated
across America.
with William Russell and several other writers and recordAnother collaborator on the book, Charles Edward Smith,
made a lasting contribution with his chapter on the role of
collectors on the groundbreaking history, Jazzmen , a substanwhite New Orleans musicians.
tial body of research has given depth and texture to our
Jazzmen provided a foundation for history. The theory
understanding of the society that gave birth to jazz.
Important raw mater-ials lie in the oral history interviews
goes something like this: New Orleans was a melting pot
with dozens of first- and second-generati-on jazzmen at
marked by the fusion of European and African musical
Tulane's Hogan Jazz Archive - as well as in Bill Russell's
forms. Congo Square slave dances planted seeds of a poly-
ORSON WELLES
"Bunk"Johnson's
new orleans
iazz band
TUES. JAN. l
Fall 1998 / LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 55
underscores an important distinction
between the darker black and fairer colored
Creole musicians. The classically-trained
Creoles, descendants of free persons, carried
a European sensibility toward music, yet one
that was flexible enough to adapt "blue
notes" and "cross-rhythms" of musicians
who carried a cultural memory of slavery.
Musicians on the role of churches
Most of the Creoles were Roman Catholic.
Hymns of the Latin Mass, perhaps most eloquently heard in Gregorian chant, were a far
cry from the churches rooted in an African
spirituality, with call-and-response singing,
polyrhythms of hand-clapping, foot-stomp-
Louis Armstrong, 1943.
rhythmic sensibility whose tendrils
entwined with a late-19th century
brass band style as it absorbed
strands of ragtime and blues. Jazz
emerged from a melding of African
polyrhythm with European instrumentation and melody.
In The Making of Jazz (1978), James
Lincoln Collier wrote:
"The rags had the "stride" bass; the marches had the
drumbeats; the dances ... the sound of the feet on the floor.
This was hardly accidental: blacks, with their tradition of
cross-rhythms, would be drawn to music with an explicit
ground beat. As black musicians came into closer contact
with the Creoles, they began to acquire the Creole repertory
of marches, rags, dances .. . At the same time, young black
Creole musicians, despite the objections of their parents,
were hearing the blues being played in black honky-tonks,
and they were beginning to inflect their music with blue
notes and those implications of cross-rhythms so much a
part of black music."
Like most jazz historians, Collier overlooks the dynamic
role of church music in the birth of the idiom; however, he
56 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMAN ITIES \Fall 1998
ing, freer body language and dramatic pulpit oratory. French
was no longer the dominant language of Creole musicians in
the early 1900s; however, it was a strand in the Creole cultural fabric that fostered an insular sense of superiority.
Music professor Manuel Manetta (1880-1969), spotlighted
the elitism in a 1958 interview with Bill Russell, discussing
early dance halls. "Bolden played on Cherokee Street, colored halls uptown ...St. Katherine's Hall was right next to the
church. Nice respectable dances. Perseverance, Cooperators,
Economy Hall, Francs Amis - that was respectable. All the
bright people would go there. The dark person wouldn't go
there ... All the people was fair. Very particular too. They
couldn't talk English good" - meaning they spoke Creole
French.
"Uptown people wouldn't go down there," continued
Manetta, referring to the downtown halls of Creole benevolent societies. "And the Creoles wouldn't go in kinda halls
like that Masonic [on top of the Eagle Saloon on Perdido and
South Rampart.] All wild people. Ratty, you know? And
uptown, they had ratty bands. King Bolden."
St. Katherine's, long since demolished, was a Catholic
parish on Tulane Avenue that hosted weekend dances. Holy
Ghost Church, farther uptown on Louisiana Avenue, sponsored a brass band in the 1920s where a young Harold
Dejan, who would become the longtime leader of the
Olympia Brass Band, got his musical start. Catholic churches
played only a small role.
One of the most popular venues where Bolden played,
was the Union and Sons Hall, nicknamed Funky Butt, on
Gravier Street downtown - long since demolished, across
from City Hall. On Sunday mornings, just a few hours after
dances that were by various reports rather earthy, the hall
future will come out and entertain the swingers under a new
name."
Barker's linkage between churches and funerals is a vital
theme in the birth of jazz. As early-century brass bands
marched through the
city - ushering
funeral corteges
toward the cemetery,
playing doleful
dirges in slow tempo
- a ritual psyche
was taking shape.
It was through
brass band funerals
that the music of
sacred spaces
reached a more pro-
Manuel Manetta.
fane arena of the streets; the slow tolling of dirges on the
march to the graveyard gave softer spiritual currents to a
culture that rocked with hot bluesy rhythms played in
honky-tonks and bawdy houses of Storyville, not to mention
the more respectable ragtime played at society balls and
Creole halls like Economy, Perseverance, Artisan and Francs
Amis.
A song like "Old Rugged Cross" (to cite but one dirge)
sang of life's burdens, awaiting a happier realm, a world
view shaped by slavery. After the coffin was lowered into
the ground, the band departed the burial grounds, and
broke into uptempo, bravura music - a "cutting loose" that
signaled the soul's release from earthly ties. Dancers in the
second line formed a cross-rhythm to the beat of the drum
turned into worship space for the First Lincoln Baptist
Church!
In his 1986 memoir, A Life in Jazz, Danny Barker wrote:
"Check out these small Baptist churches. That's where it started and that's where it's at (emphasis added) ... Go to any place
where there is a large group of under-privileged black people and, at the church services, you will steal away, steal
away to Jesus! The city still practices burying the late
deceased brothers and some sisters with the musical send off.
There are still brass bands, about a dozen, but they don't
have the sound of the old Onward, Excelsior, Eureka. Well,
jazz still lives in New Orleans in the churches, and in the
Fall 1998 / LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 57
~ "The children and the old /olks
would come back from the cemetery
... They would all get right into the
0/
this jazz music.
jubilant /eeling
So that how a lot
the songs I
s
0/
sing today has that type
The type
0/ music r m
0/ beat ...
talking
about, known to all New Orleans
people alter they buried their dead,
was 'Second Line. '" ~
An African-American woman dancing or marching in a
street parade, August, 1951.
with the shuffle and scrape of shoes on the street.
Historians have stressed that brass bands were catalytic
to the development of jazz. Comparatively little has been
~ Mahalia Jackson
written about the street dancing in parades that followed the
bands, though there is an ample photographic record in various collections, as well as a good deal
of descriptive journalism about second
liners and brass bands since the la te
1960s.
The flow of music between streets and
sacred spaces left a lasting impres-sion
on early artists. Of his boyhood, Louis
Armstrong recalled "going to church
regularly for both grandma and my
great-grandmother were Christian
women ... In church and Sunday school I
did a whole lot of singing. That, I guess,
is how I acquired my singing tactics ...
At church my heart went into every
hymn I sang." A few pages later in
Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, he
reflects: "When I was in church and
when I was 'second lining' - that is, following the brass bands in parades - I
started to listen carefully to the different
instruments, noticing the things they
played and how they played them."
Kid Ory, the pioneering trombonist
who gave Louis one of his first jobs
grew up on a plantation near LaPlace in
Wen you really deserve it,
the 1890s, made trips to New Orleans as
sit back and enjoy the pleasures of the Rib Room.
a teenager, and moved to the city in
Sip a legendary "wash bucket" martini,
1907, at twenty-one. In a memorable
try one of Chef Toups' weekly signature specials
interview with Russell, Ory said:
or treat yourself to the best prime rib that money can buy.
"Bolden got most of his tunes from the
Now is the right time to come to the French Quarter ...
'Holy Roller Church,' the Baptist church
because the theater that is Royal Street is in full production
on Jackson Avenue and Franklin. I knew
and you can always find a front row seat at the Rib Room.
he used to go that church, but not for
Free parking at Omni Royal Orleans Garage.
religion, he went there to get ideas on
music. He'd hear those songs and he
would change them a little. In those
Baptist churches, they sometimes had
drums and a piano while the people
ROTISSERIE EXTRAQRDtNAIRE
sang and clapped their hands.
CORNE R OF ROYAL & ST L OLlS STREETS IN THE HEART OF THE FRENCH QUARTER. (504) 529-7045.
Sometimes they'd have guests and invite
RIB BboM
58 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES \ Fall1998
The William Russell
Jazz Collection
William "Bill" Russell (1905-1992) was a violinist,
composer, archivist, and jazz historian. His extensive
jazz collection was acquired by the Historic New
Orleans Collection in 1992. It is available to the public,
Tuesday through Saturday at the Williams Research
Center, 410 Chartres St., New Orleans, La. 70130. (504598-7171; Wrc@hnoc.org).
Some highlights of the Russell Collection include collections devoted to Jelly Roll Morton, Bunk Johnson,
Mahalia Jackson, Manuel Manetta, Baby Dodds, Johnny
Dodds, 78 rpm jazz records, ragtime, brass bands, jazz
books and periodicals, New Orleans books and pam-
Mahalia Jackson, 1954.
a trumpet player or a trombone player to come over and
play with them .... That's where Buddy got it from and that's
how it all started."
That's how it all started. Bolden biographer Don Marquis
identifies a Baptist church in a different neighborhood,
where the Bolden family lived and worshipped; he draws no
musical linkage between the church and the repertoire of
blues and rags that Bolden played. Ory's remark is problematic on another score. Before the mid-century rise of gospel
music, Baptist churches historically looked down on jazz
and blues as sinful tunes. "Holy Roller" churches were
small, vernacular congregations like the Sanctified, or
Holiness churches, which shared commonalties of trancelike possessions with the Church of God in Christ and later,
the Spiritual Churches. These congregations were more
expressive and less conventional than the black Baptist
churches.
Even if Ory inaccurately labeled a Baptist church as
"Holy Roller," his comment, like Danny Barker's, is freighted with implications for jazz history.
"Each Sunday Bolden went to church, and that's where
he got his idea of jazz music," veteran guitarist Bud Scott
(1890-1950) recalled in the September 1947 issue of the
Record Changer. Although a Baptist Bolden may well have
drawn inspiration from one of the smaller, vernacular
churches, where rhythms of religious song, the cadences of
Bill Russell, 1958.
phlets, photographs, postcards, and sheet music.
For more information about the William Russell Jazz
Collection, readers should consult Jazz Scrapbook: Bill
Russell and Some Highly Musical Friends (New Orleans:
Historic New Orleans Collection, 1998), and "Bill
Russell: An American Ensemble," a special issue of the
Southern Quarterly (Winter, 1998). Both items are
available through the Shop at the Historic New Orleans
Collection.
"Made in America: Bill Russell's World of Jazz" is on
view at the Historic New Orleans Collection, 533 Royal
Street, in the French Quarter, through October 31,1998.
preachers, the call-and-response patterns between pulpit
and pews sent a vital current flowing through the city.
The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson told writer Jules
Schwerin of her childhood: "The children and the old folks
would come back from the cemetery, walking or on bicycles,
on trucks or wagons. They would all get right into the jubilant feeling of this jazz music. So that's how a lot of our
songs I sing today has that type of beat, because it's my
inheritance, things that I've always been doing, born and
raised-up and seen ...The type of music I'm talking about,
known to all New Orleans people after they buried their
dead, was 'Second Line.'"
A lifelong Baptist, Mahalia Jackson credited the small
Sanctified church in her childhood neighborhood, uptown
near the levee, as a shaping influence. Most Protestant
churches of the black South in the early 1900s used organs or
pianos. The Sanctified, Holiness and later Spiritual Churches
branched away from conventional African-American worship by incorporating an instrumental family akin to jazz
ensembles - drums, tambourines, strings, cymbals, even
occasional horns. These were the churches of poor folk
whose roots clung to African traditions like "holy dances" in
which people danced in rings and shouted exaltations to the
Lord, a tradition at least as old as the early 1800s at Congo
Square, where slaves danced in rings, commemorating
African gods.
60 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES \ Fall 1998
Buddy Bolden's Band, circa 1903.
Those small, poor churches of the early 1900s rocked to a
beat closer to the jazz melodies of dance halls - quite different from the a cappella hymns sung by quartets and choirs in
mainstream Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
churches. "Everybody sang and clapped and stomped their
feet, sang with their whole bodies!" Mahalia Jackson
recalled. "They had the beat, a powerful beat, a rhythm we
held onto from slavery days, and their music was so strong
and expressive, it used to bring tears to my eyes."
Kinesthesis ... a drama of history
The powerful beat "from slavery days" was a religious
expression of the movement-and-rhythm Mahalia Jackson
described in the second line.
Another word for this phenomenon is kinesthesis, a collective memory of restored behavior, carried in the flow of
body rhythms across time.
Some historians, notably Marshall Stearns, have touched
on the kinesthetic nature of jazz as expressive of cultural
memory. Stearns's The Story of Jazz makes a brief comparison
of African burial rites and jazz funerals. It has become a
commonplace in jazz history to highlight the role of the
trumpeter, sending out "call" lines for "response" by the
clarinet and rhythm players, as a structural echo of African
tribal music. Call-and-response is also central to the evolution of African-American church services, the preacher's
"call" evoking waves of "response" from the flock.
Consider the January 1851 account of a Swedish writer,
Fredrika Bremer, at the New Orleans service of an "African"
church. Th~ African Methodist Episcopal began in
Philadelphia in 1794 as a breakaway Methodist group that
merged with an Episcopal congregation. The leader, Richard
Allen, was deeply influenced by the church's doctrine of
personal piety and a gospel of salvation. Slavery was the
divisive wedge with white Protestantism.
Police spied on the New Orleans AME in the 1840s and
fifties, harassed members and raided services of the "slave
church" where free people and slaves affirmed a gospel of
freedom. Bremer describes a ring dance, similar to the circular body movements as reported by observers of the slave
dances at Congo Square. Bremer witnesses a Christian ritual,
steeped in African kinesthetics:
The words were heard, "Yes, come, Lord, Jesus! come oh
come, oh glory!" and they who thus cried aloud began to
leap - leaped aloft with a motion as of a cork flying out of a
bottle, while in the air, as if they were endeavoring to bring
something down, and all the while crying aloud, "Come, oh
come!" And as they leaped, they twisted their bodies round
in a sort of corkscrew fashion, and were evidently in a state
of convulsion; sometimes they fell down and rolled in the
aisle, amid loud, lamenting cries and groans ... Amid all the
wild tumult of crying and leaping, on the right and the left,
[a woman] continued to walk up and down the church in all
directions, with outspread arms, eyes cast upward, exclaiming in a low voice, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" At length she
sank down upon her knees on the platform by the altar, and
there she became still ... What has happened to her? we
inquired from a young Negro girl whom she knew.
"Converted," she said laconically, and joined those who
were softly rubbing the palms of the converted.
Bremer's account is one that Louis Armstrong and
Mahalia Jackson, who were born a half-century later, would
have recognized. The" convulsive" cries and leaps of worshipers carried down the years in churches with trance-like
visitations. These "comings of the spirit" distilled an essence
of African spirituality - the presence of ancestors, invoked
as the living-dead.
"The circle is linked to the most important of all African
ceremonies, the burial ceremony," writes Sterling Stucky in
Slave Culture. "Where ever in Africa the counter-clockwise
dance ceremony was performed ... the dancing and singing
were directed to the ancestors and gods." Such was the ritual psyche at the slave dances of Congo Square. As the ring
dances folded into holy dances of the churches, so the circle
slowly opened, turning outward in brass band funeral
marches, sending waves of spontaneous dancers in a sinuous second line.
If funerals are the connective tissue between streets and
sacred spaces, the musicians' oral histories tell us much
more about the parades and the benevolent societies that
sponsored them than about went [what?]transpired in the
churches. The coming together of these disparate forces the European tradition of military marching bands, and the
dynamism of African-American church services - was a
slow drama unfolding across the nineteenth-century.
A poignant cameo of this transformation rises from pages
of The Weekly Pelican, a black Republican paper published in
New Orleans in the 1880s, which listed notices of benevolent
society gatherings, parades and musical events. On Apri19,
1887, the paper reported that the Excelsior Brass Bandperhaps the leading Creole band of the day - "furnished
the music" for a "grand rally" at Central Church. The songs
included "Rock of Ages." The unsigned article reflects an
awareness of something new taking place: "This part of the
service was an innovation in the worship of the church, but
the program was so excellently carried out in every detail as
to lend additional charm to the impressiveness of the surroundings. The band deserves great credit for the wonderful
ability and capacity it displayed."
We know all too little about black New Orleans churches
from Recon-struction through the early years of this century.
Until we train the lens upon that religious culture, and its
interaction with brass bands, the birth of jazz will remain
story more than history, and an elusive one at that. LeV
Masonic parade in Algiers with the Eureka Brass Band,
March, 1956.
Jason Berry, an author and jazz researcher at The Historic New
Orleans Collection, is at work on a history of brass band funerals.
Fall 1998/ LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 61